Genoa Leilani Adolpho Keawe 1918-2008

Genoa Keawe, one of the most important musicians in the history of Hawaii, died Monday at the age of 89. Aunty Genoa was so influential on successive generations of performers in the islands that her musical family is as large as her own personal family, which includes 40 grandchildren, 98 great-grandchildren and 81 great great-grandchildren. Aunty was usually praised for her superb falsetto style or her impossible breath control, but she also had an unusually large range of Hawaiian songs. And she told me a couple years ago that before she became a professional Hawaiian singer she was a jazz singer in the great age of Hawaiian swing. She found her way into Hawaiian repertory gradually after singing "For You a Lei" on the radio one day to mark her niece's birthday. After that, she said, her Hawaiian repertory, consisting of songs she had learned in her youth, gradually became the core of her act. By 1953, when I was born, Genoa Keawe, then 35, was appearing on the "Lucky Luck Show" and "Hawaii Calls." By 1969 she had her own record label. Soon after I moved full-time to Hawaii, I brought my first wife Marilyn to a "Made in Hawaii" Festival and was intrigued to find that the most interesting thing she saw at the event was Aunty Genoa. Marilyn had been away for decades except for vacation stays and was delighted to see that Aunty, who was hot when she moved to Washington, D.C., was still singing when she moved back. After Marilyn passed away and I remarried, I found that my wife Bernadette was a relative of Aunty Genoa -- whose son Eric is married, if I'm getting it right, to Bernadette's mother's sister's daughter -- and we were so pleased to have the Keawes join us for our wedding last year. Aunty slipped in so quietly I didn't even know she had made it until the end. (We had a wonderful reception party and the lone regret I have about it is that I didn't get to ask Aunty to sing -- she might not have brought her ukulele but Keith and Carmen Haugen were there and they had their instruments. Or the Honolulu Jazz Quartet could have backed them all up, which might have been a first.) The news conference at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Monday was practically a family reunion, with dozens of relatives on hand, not to mention Raiatea Helm and Danny Kaleikini. My heart was so full I could barely ask a question and I noticed Billy V was the same. But with people like Aunty, grief takes a back seat to happy memories. This was a woman who lived her life as she thought best, patient and genial and yet also capable of toughness when she felt it was appropriate -- several friends and relatives have mentioned how passionately she pushed singers of Hawaiian songs to make sure they got the words right. (One of the most enjoyable things about being nice to people is that when something arises that you feel passionate and uncompromising about, people happily pay heed.) Eric Keawe checked his memory and said Aunty last performed in public at the Marriott on Jan. 31, though she sang with her visitors practically to the very end, and last Thursday, on her way home from the hospital, she stopped by the Marriott to enjoy her band performing with her granddaughter taking lead. In that make-up the band will continue to perform. Thus it is that sometimes a person can live on even in this life. The hard news from the news conference: the family has a collection of private recordings of live performances, a gift from a family friend, half a century old and never released in any format, which are undergoing audio processing so they can now be put out on CD. What a fitting finale to the story of a woman so durable that her career lasted more than 60 years. Even now, Aunty Genoa has one more album in her.